Abstract: Accurate symbol recognition in graphic documents needs an accurate representation of the symbols to be recognized. If structural approaches are used for recognition, symbols have to be described in terms of their shape, using structural relationships among extracted features. Unlike statistical pattern recognition, in structural methods, symbols are usually manually defined from expertise knowledge, and not automatically infered from sample images. In this work we explain one approach to learn from examples a representative structural description of a symbol, thus providing better information about shape variability. The description of a symbol is based on a probabilistic model. It consists of a set of lines described by the mean and the variance of line parameters, respectively providing information about the model of the symbol, and its shape variability. The representation of each image in the sample set as a set of lines is achieved using deformable template matching.

Abstract: Scene text extraction methodologies are usually based in classification of individual regions or patches, using a priori knowledge for a given script or language. Human perception of text, on the other hand, is based on perceptual organisation through which text emerges as a perceptually significant group of atomic objects. Therefore humans are able to detect text even in languages and scripts never seen before. In this paper, we argue that the text extraction problem could be posed as the detection of meaningful groups of regions. We present a method built around a perceptual organisation framework that exploits collaboration of proximity and similarity laws to create text-group hypotheses. Experiments demonstrate that our algorithm is competitive with state of the art approaches on a standard dataset covering text in variable orientations and two languages.

Abstract: Information Retrieval (IR) is the activity of obtaining information resources relevant to a questioned information. It usually retrieves a set of objects ranked according to the relevancy to the needed fact. In document analysis, information retrieval receives a lot of attention in terms of symbol and word spotting. However, through decades the community mostly focused either on printed or on single writer scenario, where the
state-of-the-art results have achieved reasonable performance on the available datasets. Nevertheless, the existing algorithms do not perform accordingly on multiwriter scenario. A graph representing relations between a set of objects is a structure where each node delineates an individual element and the similarity between them is represented as a weight on the connecting edge. In this paper, we explore different analytics of graphs constructed from words or graphical symbols, such as diffusion, shortest path, etc. to improve the performance of information retrieval methods in multiwriter scenario

Abstract: Assessing the physical condition in rehabilitation scenarios is a challenging problem, since it involves Human Activity Recognition (HAR) and kinematic analysis methods. In addition, the difficulties increase in unconstrained rehabilitation scenarios, which are much closer to the real use cases. In particular, our aim is to design an upper-limb assessment pipeline for stroke patients using smartwatches. We focus on the HAR task, as it is the first part of the assessing pipeline. Our main target is to automatically detect and recognize four key movements inspired by the Fugl-Meyer assessment scale, which are performed in both constrained and unconstrained scenarios. In addition to the application protocol and dataset, we propose two detection and classification baseline methods. We believe that the proposed framework, dataset and baseline results will serve to foster this research field.

Abstract: Document classification usually requires of structural features such as the physical layout to obtain good accuracy rates on complex documents. This paper introduces a descriptor of the layout and a distance measure based on the cyclic dynamic time warping which can be computed in O(n2). This descriptor is translation invariant and can be easily modified to be scale and rotation invariant. Experiments with this descriptor and its rotation invariant modification are performed on the Girona archives database and compared against another common layout distance, the minimum weight edge cover. The experiments show that these methods outperform the MWEC both in accuracy and speed, particularly on rotated documents.